Don't put me in a bad box

I have to admit that I laughed at Gene Weingarten's latest column in the Washington Post . As somebody working in public relations maybe I shouldn't be admiting to this, but Gene is right...to a certain extent. His column titled "Don't Call Us, we'll call you...names" is about stupid PR people. Not such an original idea, but it has merit.

Gene talks about the annoying voicemails he deletes from idiotic and clueless PR "pros" everyday, 15 actually. This is because he somehow got onto a media contact list, as a lifestyle reporter, he says. The other day he was asked to update his listing, and this is what he wrote.


Q: What are your beats?

A: My primary responsibility is to savagely attack the quality of retail products and services. I rely on initial cold-call contacts from PR professionals to select which companies I will attempt to bankrupt through unfair reporting techniques leading to shockingly unfounded criticism. For example, I will fail to disclose that the bicycle I panned as "slow, sluggish and difficult to maneuver" was test-driven at the bottom of a swimming pool.

My secondary responsibility mostly involves ripping PR professionals a new one.

Q: What types of stories would be of most interest to you?

A: I have many interests, principal among them is exposing America as a flabby, complacent society addicted to the purchase and consumption of products and services no one really needs, while famine spreads all over the globe. Some examples of this disgusting excess are every single product and service your particular company represents. I would appreciate a list of all your clients.

In addition, I am interested in exposing the unholy alliance between the aforementioned PR industry and the soulless marketing industry, which exists to dehumanize people, categorizing them not by any meaningful demographic relating to their needs or abilities, but by the likelihood they may be cajoled or deceived into making silly, discretionary purchases they cannot afford. Here are some analogies and comparisons I have used in the past to explain my feelings about the evil entity created by the entwinement of the marketing and public relations industries:

"The marketing-PR axis makes the team of Hitler and Mussolini seem benevolent. "

"When a sulfurous, steaming dish of public relations is liberally seasoned with oily globules of marketing, the resulting concoction could nauseate a carrion vulture."

"Marketing professionals are to PR professionals as Erszebet Bathory, the 16th-century noblewoman who killed her servant girls and bathed in their blood, is to the Gaboon viper, a six-foot-long spatulate-headed central African snake with two-inch fangs whose bite causes massive tissue damage, catastrophic internal hemorrhaging, hemorrhagic fever and a slow, shuddering death."

Q: What tips would you give PR professionals who may want to contact you? What is your preferred mention of being contacted?

A: I encourage midnight visits to my home by PR professionals who have no immediate relatives or close friends. Note: Please enter through the basement dungeon room.


I find this hilarious. And this might be bad, I also agree. I think that what the position of a PR person should be to represent the organization, when needed, and to facilitate the media, when needed. Those are the key words. Be familiar and connected with the media and your organization so that when you honestly have a good story you know who to approach and who would be interested. And, also be in the position where the media contact YOU and ask you for information, experts, opinions, angles etc. If you truly work for an interesting and valid organization then respected media WILL want to write stories and you should NEVER have to leave messages like those Gene rants about.

Sorry for all the caps. But, really, who are these people out there putting all PR people in the "bad" box. Just stop.

Got crabs? Walmart does, and they are not from "Deadliest Catch"

What! Walmart is at is again? Poor PR people, as I heard someone say the other day they must really hate life. This time what started as a brilliant marketing strategy went terribly wrong.

Riding on the success of Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch", a seafood distributor came up with the idea to market King crab sold exclusively at Walmart as being from one of the boats on the show. The only boat to say yes? The Northwestern.

Only catch, this catch is not from the Northwestern. check out the box.



Pretty blatantly trying to give the perception that this is Northwestern crab. There is a picture of the boat and even captain Sig's signature. But now check out the back of the box.




There are so many things that are
wrong with this. Let me try to make a list...

1. Walmart tries to be all-American, we support the heart of America, the working class, and then they undermine that very working class by supporting unregulated Russian crabbing.

2. It's just stupid. Yes, good idea to use the success of the show as a marketing tool. But, who was the person that thought American's were so stupid that no one would notice the product of Russia label on the box? That is just insulting, and poor strategic planning.

3. The Northwestern issued a statement, and as most damage control goes, it fails to include any of the bad stuff. Read it here at the Vario Creative blog.

4. In response to the statement. Let me just say, as someone with insiders in Dutch Harbor, the rest of the crabbing industry is NOT excited about this move by the Northwestern. If it was such a great and noble idea, as the Northwestern tries to claim, why did the other captains on "Deadliest Catch" repeatedly turn down these same promotional offers?

5. It is a classic example of greed trumping thought. Because if you do any thinking about this issue, you realize there are profound environmental, economic and social ramifications.

6. I can't list all of the environmental, economic and social issues here. And, some others have already done a good job of summing them up. Check out Alaska Report for more of an idea about the effect Russian crab poaching has on the American market.

Also for a little more balanced coverage of the issue (blogs and statements tend to be a little biased, in case you didn't know) check out this Seattle Times article.

Don't worry. It's all about making YOU happy

There are a lot of negative connotations that people associate with PR. But, from my brief experience in the professional world of PR, it seems to mostly be about trying to make everyone happy.

For example, in the nameless organization where I find myself interning, there are a lot of "experts" on a lot of different topics. This makes us a valuable resource for any reporter who needs an expert for a story they are working on. (For more on "experts" see my previous post) All media requests are filtered through our public relations office. But, imagine if we were approaching busy experts everyday asking them to talk to reporter so-and-so. They would get worn out, annoyed and would take all negative feeling out on us.

So, how do we keep our experts happy so that they will help us keep the reporters happy? We write press releases about the exciting work they are doing, we pitch the stories to the media and we get their work into print (or tv, radio etc). This makes the experts happy. When they are happy because their new project was just featured on CNN, they are more willing to say ok when we pass on a ridiculous request from a reporter.

How do we keep the reporters happy? We find them experts when they need them and we send them all sorts of story ideas and material, maybe too much sometimes. But, you reporters out there, before you start complaining realize that we are doing it all for you. We are doing it to keep the experts happy so that next time you call us two hours before deadline and need a good quote or update on research from one of our experts, we can say ok.

In this example I think its clear that we do what we do to help everyone else. So before you get mad at an annoying PR person, remember they are just trying to keep someone happy. And who knows when the day will come that the person they are working to keep happy is you?

You mean Facebook can be useful?

Peter Shankman writes about a creative way to use Facebook, to the benefit of reporters, experts and PR professionals. And, before you roll your eyes, its more than just using it as a way to poke friends.

He has created a group (you must be on Facebook to view) of all the "experts" he knows from various fields. That way when he gets one of those requests from a reporter needing a good quote, etc, he can send out a message to his group of experts and get a response. I have to say this is a genius idea in three ways.

1. Reporters can easily get a hold of an expert on any number of topics by simply contacting Peter.

2. The experts who are on this list has a no hassles way to be on the radar of any reporter and will more likely get good coverage of themselves and any projects or causes they are associated with.

3. The most genius part of all? Peter control all of it! The reporters can't simply browse the experts themselves and send out requests. Peter is the god. All requests must be filtered through him, giving him the ultimate power in connecting the media with his closed list of experts.

OpenSocial: Another Gift from the Google Gods?

I have my Facebook life and my MySpace life. I suppose I could really have profiles all over the web if I desired. But, who has the time? There is constant maintenance, uploading pictures so that everyone knows what you've been up to, writing on walls, stalking other people's profiles etc. Why can't someone come up with a way for all my friends on all my networks to be combined into one? One login, one password, one profile about my interests (it feels lame enough to list "curling up with a book" as an interest, please don't make me write it out ten times!)

It seems like Google may have come up with a quasi-solution, and its name is OpenSocial. Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management writes on the Google Blog

"we're excited to introduce OpenSocial, a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web. OpenSocial allows developers to write an application once that will run anywhere that supports the OpenSocial APIs."

You mean now I'm going to get bitten by Vampires on MySpace too! Well, not exactly, because Facebook isn't apart of the OpenSocial network, yet. But, I have to ask, is there anyone out there who really enjoys all of these applications? Because I certainly don't. And I'm not really excited about the fact that developers will be able to post their applications on a variety of hosts.

Joe also writes,

"All these social networks are looking to give their communities more and more things to do -- and they realize they can't do it on their own."

Um, where did he get this idea. And I want to know who the people are that want more applications and more time wasted from their social networking sites?

Give me my friends, good searching abilities in order to find them, a profile picture, some personal info (it makes the stalking more fun), the ability to write my friends messages and get their contact info and I will be happy. Because I don't want to play online poker with them, I don't want to throw sheep, I don't want to be a zombie and I won't want to rate which people I am most like. I want to write to them and maybe even give them a call so that we can meet up and socialize the old fashioned way.

At first I was excited to read about OpenSocial because I thought it would be a way to connect my many different networks into one. I'm not an expert and correct me, please, if I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem to be the point of OpenSocial. More so, it is to benefit the developers, their prized applications and maybe, the prized advertising dollars that these applications rake in?

Good move, SHIFT

New media consultant and blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick recently called out some PR professionals for their poor pitches (I'm digging the alliteration). There is a lot to be learned from his advice. One of the most relevant pieces is how the blogsphere makes the learning process more public. But, maybe that is a good thing. I definitely know that I will think more critically about any pitch I'm sending out.

My main point however, is to compliment SHIFT on a good PR move. Just like I was recently saying in my post about The Daily Show, one of the best popularity-enhancing moves you can make is to laugh at yourself. And SHIFT definitely did this by not only posting on Marshall's blog but by publishing their own post on PR Squared. The post openly admitted to a mistake with no attempt at excuses. The post was full of good-natured humor as well as a screen shot of the offending PR professional's original post.

Not only did this strategy paint SHIFT in a more human and transparent light, get them some extra buzz, and more traffic to their blog but it got them an in with Marshall from now on. He writes in response to the comments from SHIFT

"thanks for being such a good sport, you drop me a line any time."

If PR is all about building relationships, SHIFT sure found a great way to form one with Marshall. As I said before, good move.

It's time for fourthmeal

As if American's weren't fat enough Taco Bell has decided that we should be eating a fourth, late night, fat-laden meal. Well, we were probably already doing it, but Taco Bell decided to capitalize on this trend by making it their own with the fourthmeal campaign. The problem with doing this is that it normalizes something that previously wasn't as accepted.

Yeah, Americans were eating unhealthy, over-processed abundant amounts of calories before the Taco Bell campaign. But, once there is a name for the act, fourthmeal, and it becomes part of the vernacular, the act itself is normalized. I'm sure some people think that I'm being an uptight health freak. Fast food is ok, once in a while, for the young and fit people shown in the ads. But, in reality the majority of Americans are overweight and inactive. The consequences of promoting eating another fast food meal are real and disastrous.

I know the campaign is all in the name of creative marketing. But don't companies have a responsibility to question how their great marketing scheme affects public health? We've had outrage over campaigns that normalize youth smoking or binge drinking. What about campaigns that normalize and promote the obesity epidemic?